Foster Care: A National Consultation with Foster Carers & Social Workers 2015-2016

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What they wanted

The Irish Foster Care Association and Tusla initiated a process to proactively identify service gaps from a national perspective. They wanted to bring the voice of foster carers and social workers into focus – highlighting the key strategic and structural issues impacting services delivered to children in care as well as those who care for them.

What we did

Quality Matters facilitated a national consultation involving 60 hours of conversation with over 300 foster carers and social workers.To achieve a broad consultation, the process commenced with a survey followed by a series of 16 consultations, which were held over the course of five months. . The consultations were exploratory in nature and solution-focused, participants engaged openly, honestly, and critically around issues of key importance in the fostering relationship. After examination of shared challenges participants were facilitated to develop suggestions for how things could be improved. This approach helped foster carers and social workers to deepen collaboration and reinvigorate partnership. Quality Matters also produced the development of an animated video to launch the report and explore findings from the main report.